In January
2005, some remarkable things happened on the Sun, and the
implications are still reverberating through the scientific
community. Between January 15th and 19th four
powerful solar flares erupted from “sunspot 720”, shown in the
picture above. Then on January 20 the fifth explosion produced a
coronal mass ejection (CME) that achieved velocities incomparably
greater than anything astronomers had seen before. While it often
takes more than 24 hoursfor the charged particles of a solar
outburst to reach the Earth, this one was a profound exception. Just
thirty minutes after the explosion, Earth (some 96 million miles
from the Sun) was immersed in what NASA scientists called “the most
intense proton storm in decades”. Proton storms get their name from
the “rain” of positively charged particles when a mass ejection
reaches the Earth.

One reason
proton storms get attention is that they interfere with satellite
communications and can even penetrate the skin of space suits and
make astronauts sick. But for the proponents of popular theories
about the Sun, this “storm” was far more than an irritant. According
to a NASA news release, the event “has shaken the foundations of
space weather theory”.

Prior to this event, how did astronomers explain proton storms?
NASA’s “Headline News” story tells us that the mass ejection “begins
with an explosion, usually above a sunspot. Sunspots are places
where strong magnetic fields poke through the surface of the Sun.
For reasons no one completely understands, these fields can become
unstable and explode, unleashing as much energy as 10 billion
hydrogen bombs”.

Powerful
ejections can throw off a billion tons of solar material. Normally
they travel relatively slowly. “Even the
fastest ones, traveling one to two thousand km/s, take a day or so
to reach Earth. You know a CME has just arrived when you see auroras
in the sky”.

But how does
the ejected material attain its observed speeds? Even common
ejections travel faster and faster as they move outward from the
Sun, achieving speeds up to a thousand miles per second or more.
This acceleration, the theory surmises, can be explained by the
“shock waves” that the CME produces. “Shock
waves in front of the CME can accelerate these protons in our
direction—hence the proton storm”.

But this space weather theory is “soon to be revised”, the story
says. Here’s why: Though the speeds of typical CMEs are impressive,
and have posed a deep mystery for decades, they do not come close to
the speed of the January 20 ejection.
Light from the
Sun (or from a solar flare) reaches Earth in 8 minutes. An ejection
reaching Earth in 30 minutes must be rapidly accelerated to
velocities more than a quarter of the speed of light. From the
traditional viewpoint, this is unthinkable. And yet it happened.

How, then, do
theorists of the Electric Universe see all of this? Most are amused
by the commotion. In the universe now observed with better and more
versatile instruments, we see plasma jets and ejected material often
attaining velocities approaching the speed of light. In electrical
terms, the explanation is direct and obvious: electric fields in
space accelerate charged particles. On this electrical
principle there is no debate. But by banishing electric fields from
their theoretical models, astronomers and astrophysicists are left
with no mechanism to account for the things they now see. One after
another, the ad hoc guesses must be abandoned.

The electrical
theorists accept the observed facts concerning CMEs, but they
consider the astronomer’s theoretical framework to be a decades-long
disaster. It is neither sufficient nor accurate to describe sunspots
as “places where strong magnetic fields
poke through the surface of the Sun”. Such a claim fails to account
for the magnetic fields themselves and leaves the associated sunspot
events unexplained. When the NASA story says that the magnetic
fields “become unstable and explode, unleashing as much energy as 10
billion hydrogen bombs”, it adds that “no one completely
understands” how this occurs.

The authors of the news release are clearly not familiar with
electrical discharge in plasma, a phenomenon outlined in great
detail by Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfvén, the founder of plasma
cosmology. Alfven’s contributions were rooted in direct observation
of plasma discharge in the laboratory. He described how the
insulating layers of the cellular structures that form in
electrified plasma often break down, causing instabilities. Such
instabilities are typified by the energetic explosions we see above
sunspots.

But even when the implications are obvious to the electrical
theorists, they seem to elude solar physicists. Reflecting on the
January 20 outburst, astrophysicist Robert Lin of UC Berkeley
affirmed that, “We have an important clue”. He noted that when the
explosion occurred, sunspot 720 was located at a special place on
the Sun: 60 degrees west longitude. This is significant, he said,
because from this location “the sunspot was magnetically connected
to Earth”. By this he meant that the lines of force of the Sun’s
magnetic field, followed outward from that point along their
spiraling path, lead directly to the Earth. The NASA headline
article called this “a superhighway for protons leading all the way
from sunspot 720 to our planet”.

Though the article accurately describes the “highway” taken by
the charged particles, it concludes, “How they were accelerated,
however, remains a mystery”. It’s a mystery only to them. Neither
Lin nor the article’s author is familiar with the “field aligned
currents” documented by Alfvén. By following the direction of the
induced magnetic fields, electric currents move efficiently, like
transmission lines, across the vast distances of interplanetary,
interstellar, and intergalactic space.

Plasma specialist Anthony Peratt, in his textbook The Physics of
the Plasma Universe, begins the description of field-aligned
currents with this overview: “...electric
fields aligned along the magnetic field direction freely accelerate
particles. Electrons and ions are accelerated in opposite
directions, giving rise to a current along the magnetic field
lines.”

Retired professor of electrical engineering, Donald Scott, does not mince
words when responding to the astrophysicists’ lack of knowledge of
electrical phenomena: “Any
student of physics who has heard of electric charge and electric
fields knows that the easiest way to get electrically charged
particles to accelerate is to apply an electric
field to them. The acceleration of the positively charged
solar "wind" particles is clearly an electrical phenomenon. It is
accurately predicted by the Electric Sun model”.

The
quarter-light-speed CME of January 20 is not just an isolated
exception to the “normal” solar wind. It demonstrates that the
“normal” explanation for the solar wind is mistaken and unable to
account for the extremes of solar wind behavior. (On some occasions,
the wind had stopped—an event just as unexplainable by standard
theory as the January 20 event.) The electrical acceleration of
plasma accounts for the entire range of wind behavior.

(Thanks to Michael Armstrong for much of the factual content in this
Picture of the Day).